As the Internet has become increasingly popular, online social networks are becoming an important and pervasive mechanism for communication, entertainment, and profession and social networking. Some online social networks use digital advertisements to meet or defray the costs of hosting. Some of the advertisements, however, are directed to commercial products, which may not be of interest to many people using an online social network for the purposes described above.
Some other online social networking systems may proactively highlight new or popular members of the systems. However, the highlighted members may have little in common with other users of the social network system that view these highlights. To find members with similar interests, users may have to perform searches using a search feature of the online social network system. However, the search results may be dependent on the accuracy of the search terms entered by the user. Additionally, the search mechanism may not provide members with an opportunity to make their profiles more prominent in the search result.
Also, the ability of the members to highlight themselves may be limited by the proactive nature of the searching because a user may have to purposely initiate a search for other members before members with similar interests are highlighted for the user.